Ancestry/Genealogy

I have found it to be awesome.

I don't care that much for the ethnic breakdown part, although it sort of boggled my mind that my dad registered as Scandahoovian rather than as German. I mean if you look at the ethnicity of his great great grandparents it is

5/16 German
4/16 Swiss (German speaking so I always kinda added them to the kraut)
3/16 English
2/16 Scot
1/16 Irish
1/16 French (huguenot)

and yet their DNA test said

17% Scandanavian
15% western europe
15% Italy/Greece
15% Ireland
14% Great Britain
11% Spain
10% Eastern Europe

I guess that means the Scots were originally Normans or Saxons. Italy/Greece presumably comes from the Swiss connection.

Anyway, for me the best part came from the cousin matches. Recently I had found a supposed brother of my great great great grandfather, and a bunch of his descendants. Well, there kind of was no way to verify if that connection was real. A dna match from one or two of the descendants though, seems to do it.

It has been fun for me too, to be able to help some people. Although I am kinda non-plused that I have not heard back from them. One person had seven people in his tree and I sent him data on 40 more.

So far, it has not extended my own tree at all, except perhaps on my mom's side, but I do not know if that person is a father to my ancestor or just an uncle. I have a couple of places to look, if I can find records from there. I kind of need some more people to do tests. For example, my tree stops at Isaac Chamberlain (1799 Connecticut) I have some leads on perhaps extending that back to 1589, if I can a) verify it and b) find the missing links. I have contacted a 3rd cousin from that line and hope I can talk him into getting a DNA test.

From my experience, it seems to me that their test tells more about a male than it does for a female. My dad had a connection to a cousin and a bunch of other lines from that ancestor and yet that cousin was not connecting to those other lines, and she should have. Well, going back to their common ancestor, my dad is a son of a son of a son, and she is the daughter of a daughter of a daughter or a son of a daughter. Dad connects to 12 other common relatives, and yet this cousin does not.

Then again, who knows what cousins that she is connecting to that my dad is not. Maybe I should compare ethnicity with these cousins and I can figure out where that Scandahoovian came from.